Get Ready for the GOP’s New Talking Points

Posted on Feb 1, 2010

Screen capture from Gawker.com

Vocabulary time with Frank Luntz: This screen capture from Gawker shows a few of the GOP’s recommended phrases to battle financial reform in coming weeks.

Certain vigilant operatives from the blogosphere have caught wind of some key words and phrases that we might soon be hearing on Fox News, as Republican pollster and memo composer Frank Luntz has let fly with his latest manifesto on how to spin the news about happenings on Capitol Hill to the GOP’s advantage.

Click here to peruse some excerpts from Luntz’s memo curated by Gawker.

The Huffington Post:

In a 17-page memo titled, “The Language of Financial Reform,” Luntz urged opponents of reform to frame the final product as filled with bank bailouts, lobbyist loopholes, and additional layers of complicated government bureaucracy.

“If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated,” Luntz wrote. “This is your critical advantage. Washington’s incompetence is the common ground on which you can build support.”

Elizabeth Warren of the congressional committee investigating the financial meltdown finds low interest loans and too big to fail banks shared some fault in creating this mess. She also finds the BIGGEST reason is the deregulatin of the banking industry. I say lay most of the blame on former senator Phil Gramm.( sorry if I misspelled his name)
(not sorry for blaming him)Ronald Reagan can also take a lot of blame.They thought that human greed could and should be controlled by self regulation.

We are all still waiting with baited breath to actually hear or read the Republican DO-ing points instead of mere talking points.

At what point did politicians surrender their ability to think and act to the talking bean-baggers ? How about more DO and less doo-doo ?

Party affiliation has nothing to do with the fact that politics is now just a huge tit-for-tat swing of the pendulum ..... NOTHING concrete ever gets done by any party or individual.
Example: Somebody please explain to me what Scott Brown will do that is one iota different from the likes of Evan Bayh. Put them all in a bag and shake it up .... no matter what you pull out it will be nothing but jabber. I heard a rumor that Sen. Demint is just a clone of Sen. Harkin.

I filled a drawer at home with dark socks - all the same color. Each morning, I pull out two socks and they always match and I am on my way, even in total darkness. Is that the future of American “progress”?

The Democrats are vulnerable to this attack because they more or less have the same philosophy and approach to the problems as the Republicans. The underlying problems are not being faced, much less dealt with, so the parties can concentrate on technical details, such as who is more incompetent.

“If there is one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats that in many ways led to the economic crash must never be repeated,” Luntz wrote.

Oh Good ... that’s clear then. And here I thought all those guys taking home multi-million dollar bonuses for betting other people’s money might have had something to do with it. Or was it the legislators who did away with the regulations? At least now it’s clear that it was the fault of those horrible bureaucrats ...

Well, if the Republicans can frame regulating Banksters as being Evil Government Bureacracy then we can conclude both that the American public is as stupid as it gets, and that the language we use for communication is sorely lacking. Neither of which will surprise me one bit.

Just thinking about it makes me want to go into a monastery and take a vow of silence! The coming campaign promises to be a verbal barrage of staggering polysyllabic deceit like none other in memorable history.